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All about the recent elections in the UK D
uring the recent elections the exit polls and results were very different to the polls leading up to general election, this has lead to people being very cynical about elections, but was it always like this? Would our ancestors be surprised at how silly it has all got? Were they taken in by it all or, like most of us, were they sick of hearing about it? Surprisingly enough, we don’t have to go back very far, to see the day when most people weren’t actually able to vote. We all know about Emmeline Pankhurst and the “Votes for Women” struggles during the early years of the last century but looking back a century earlier, it was only the select few who actually had a right to vote. In the early C19th, very few British people were able to choose their leaders. In 1780, a survey showed that, in England and Wales, only 214,000 people, less than 3% of the eight million who were living here then, were actually entitled to vote. The MPs were also not distributed in any way which was fair either. Cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds didn’t actually have any MPs, yet places other places know as Rotten Boroughs, notoriously Old Sarum
which had one resident, but kept 2 seats in parliament and Dunwich with a population of 32 people in 1831, still had two! Qualification to vote was usually ownership of property and the first reforms were brought in during the 1832 Reform Act and there were subsequent ones in 1867 and 1884. After 1832, you could vote if you paid more than ten pounds a year in rent or rates but that only applied in towns. If you lived in the countryside, you had to have a freehold of over 40/ as well as other qualifications. This alteration made over 720,000 voters from a population of 10,000,000 potentials. Slight alterations were made in 1867 and in 1872 the secret ballot was introduced. Yes, until then, everyone knew who you voted for and this means bribery and corruption was rife. By 1884, most British men over 21, could vote if they lived in the same place for a year. Women over thirty were given the vote in February 1918 and the time for living in a place was Article continues on page 8
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